The artistic life of Yoko Ono began amid the bombings over Japan during World War II. A young Yoko fled with her family to the countryside where food and basic goods were scarce. There, with her younger brother, she spent days gazing at the sky as a way to escape the horrors of war. She later recalled that imagining meals in the air and using their power of visualization helped them survive. For Ono, that moment felt like an early seed of art.
From that point on, creation became relentless, always framed by the theme of personal fragmentation and the need to connect, share, and collaborate to build a more just and equal society. Ono emerged as a benchmark in participatory art by inviting the public to become a concrete element of her works. The Tate Modern in London has gathered many of these works for the exhibition Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, which surveys nearly six decades of her practice and invites visitors from February 15 to September 1. The show highlights Ono as a transformative, incomplete, and participatory artist, inviting viewers to co-create and reflect.
Participatory Art
Among the pieces on display is the anthology Grapefruit, published in 1964, a collection of hundreds of instructions meant to guide audiences to imagine, experiment, and complete works either physically or in their minds. one instruction reads: Make a hole in a canvas and reach through from the back to greet your guests in that position. Shake hands and converse through them. A reproduction of that canvas is among the almost two hundred works shown in the gallery.
Ono understood participatory art as a way to place the audience at the center and to unite a society scarred by war and conflict. Juliet Bingham, the exhibition’s curator, stresses that this goal lies at the core of the presentation. Ono described her art as transformative, incomplete, and participatory. Throughout the tour, visitors can add their own shadows to a single canvas in Shadow Piece from 1963, write messages to their mothers and display them on the wall in My Mommy is Beautiful from 2004, or play a game of chess on a board with all squares and pieces painted white from White Chess Set, 1966. The guiding instruction asks to play while remembering where all the pieces are.
Pieces like the White Chess Set empower Ono to advance her mission of reducing conflict and fostering a peaceful, egalitarian society. Bingham notes that Ono began producing more works that amplify her pacifist message. Dozens of works reference the sky as a metaphor for peace and freedom. The sky she remembered from childhood in Japan appears in works such as Helmets: Pieces of Sky (2001), which uses German WWII helmets hung from the ceiling and filled with blue puzzle pieces that visitors can take home.
Activism with Lennon
The exhibition also makes room for the actions Ono took with her husband, John Lennon, to spread her pacifist message. Highlights include the recordings of Give Peace a Chance from 1969, photographs from the War is Over If You Want It campaign with large posters placed in iconic city spaces in London and New York, and a segment from Bed Peace, a 1969 documentary that recalls the moment the couple spoke to the press from their hotel bed in Montreal in protest of the Vietnam War.